My band recorded this in my basement the night before our show at the blind pig. (The second song is Wasted Hearts.) Less

Our latest True Outlaw Story features drummer Paul English remembering some of their most memorable bar fights, backstage tussles, and post-show skirmishes, defending the tour from all evil-doers. Recommended: Willie Nelson: One Hell of a Ride and Stardust (Legacy Edition) Producer: Joyride Media Less

Learn about your world! This lesson will teach you how to conjugate regular AR and IR verbs using language and country name vocabulary. Less

Here's a first crack at adding a little gospel organ. If someone else wants to come up with a better organ part, please feel free. I just played this quick on my laptop's keyboard. Less

Cortex has given me a taste of MuFi collaboration, and I like it. This is a simply acoustic country gospel ballad about sin and possible redemption. Anyone is welcome to download it and contribute. In my ears, it needs some organ and some close harmony, but whatever anybody wants to do to it, if they want to do anything, is welcome. Here are the lyrics: There's a glorious mansion on the hill, on the hill There's a glorious mansion on the hill There's a promise that I made once I keep it still, I keep it still There's a glorious mansion on the hill There's some sinning that I done once I sinned my fill, I sinned my fill There's a glorious mansion on the hill There's a good I must find in me I will fulfill I will fulfill There's a glorious mansion on the hill I swore to give up roving And so I will, and so I will There's a glorious mansion on the hill I'll turn from rowdy ways Right up until, right up until I reach that glorious mansion on the hill Less

Three merged takes showing (hopefully) the evolution of a song In honour of chococat's post earlier today, I dug out three evolving versions of this song we used to do in the Failsworth Pilgrims - (It's Matt's tune and lyrics.) I though it neatly illustrated a) Three different "sounds" of the same song. b) That the last version isn't always the best. The first version is the simple demo version with just Matt on - (although i think there's some violin and second guitar in there too - I'm assuming he didn't know we were recording this as it doesn't seem to be a "take". The second version is a jammed band version. This is probably where we should have left it. It sounds like we're actually trying in this version. Unfamilar with the structure, sober enough to listen and relying on our skills playing with each other, as opposed to muscle memory, this is us sounding like a band. Despite it not really being a song as such, this is the trackI listen to when i want to be reminded what a good band we were. The third version is included for the sake of completion. This is a few hours later and, though we're probably enjoying ourselves more, we're clearly drunk and fucking around. It also includes one of the more appaling fluffed endings you'll hear today. Eesh. This song was written by Matt Evans, my only contribution here is acoustic guitar, time-keeping and a "yeah!" in the second take. Less

A new song. An uncommonly bleak and maudlin crime tale. I am aware that when you find yourself writing a song called "They Never Found her Head," you should probably stop what you're doing and reconsider. And not simply reconsider the lyrics, or the song itself. I mean you should reconsider what you're doing with your life. You should drag yourself away from the ukulele and over to a nearby mirror and look at yourself, shaken and ashen, wondering how things went so wrong. You should; I don't. I suppose I've always like the grimness of some old country songs, which don't shy away from grotesque details. Some early country is taken straight from news stories of local tragedies, and, back in the middle part of the century, newspapers had no problem publishing lurid photographs coupled with pathetic text, telling tales of small lives and early, violent ends. I have quite a few books of photographs from the era, and they are startling both in their immediacy and their intimacy. We often see the dead photographed shortly after their death, at the place they fell, unflattering and invasive as such an image might be. I guess this is the lyrical version of such a story, and, in keeping with country's longstanding tradition of telling sad tales, I have tried to make it as sad as possible. "THEY NEVER FOUND HER HEAD" LYRICS: They never found her head They never found her head There was only a ring to identify her In the place where she lay dead The place where she lay dead The place where she lay dead They found the a letter she was writing him But they never found her head She'd moved to the city from Omaha Only three years ago She didn't have enough money to make it there But she had too little to go She sent postcards home every month And she lied on every one Telling of jobs she'd never had And of things she'd never done He visited her once a year ago And said she didn't look well She was living with two girls in one bedroom In a residence hotel They talked for a while over fast food fries Of the times that they once knowed The next day he rode a Greyhound home As she watched him from the road It was two am when the call came in It was five when it made the news But it took two weeks for word to get to him Along with her ring, her dress, her shoes There was a letter packed with her effects And it's first word was goodbye It said I know I'll probably die out here But we all someday die Less

A new song. Sometimes you just find yourself writing a Johnny Cash song. FIRSTLY, let me say that I have never used cocaine. Now let me say that I have been around the stuff my entire life. My father had huge amount of cocaine in his office when I was a boy. And it was uncut. It had to be. He is a psychopharmacologist, and was studying the effects of cocaine on prenatal chicks, or something. I never really knew what he was researching, except that cocaine was involved. I went to high school in the Eighties, and, if you went to a relatively well-off high school, as I did, there tended to be cocaine floating around the school. The year I graduated, my alma mater, Minnetonka High School, was the subject of a cocaine bust that was supposed to be the largest in the country. When I entered the University of Minnesota in the fall, at orientation, I found myself in a group with a dozen of my fellow Minnetonka graduates. The group had a little mixer, in which we went around, introduced ourselves, named our high school, and said a little about our interests. Everyone from Minnetonka sniffed their noses meaningfully when they mentioned the high school; some rubbed their noses vigorously. Their interests? "Snow sports;" "pharmacy sciences;" "powder cosmetics," etc. In college, I was close friends with a fellow named Kenny, who had apparently gone on a cocaine-fueled multi-state crime bender in his late teens, but had cleaned himself up. He told me that to support his habit, he used to walk into the Dayton's department store, which then had a very liberal return policy. He would go into the electronics section, grab a high-end item, and then walk up to the counter and ask to return it. Although he could not produce a receipt, the store policy was to accept returns, and so he walked out with a wad of cash. He and his girlfriend would buy a large amount of cocaine and set it on a table, and then dare themselves not to use it. "If we can't keep from using all this tonight, we are addicted," the would tell each other. The next morning, looking at the table, now empty of cocaine, they would nod their heads somberly and say "I guess we're addicted." I worked on some projects with a fellow in Los Angeles, and he started using crack cocaine for some reason. One day I stopped by to visit him, and found him looking haggard. "I think I should stop with the crack," he told me. I asked him what had made him come to this conclusion. "Well, for the last hour, I've been crawling around on my apartment floor, trying to smoke grains of sugar or salt that I find. Finally, I was squatting over in the corner, going through the carpet, when I saw a cockroach. We stared at each other for a moment, and then it said, 'Hey! What are you doing??'" My experience with people who have used cocaine is universally bad. Sometimes, at a party, in the john, you get trapped next to someone who has just done a line, and they start talking. They will talk frenetically for a half-hour, sweating and bug-eyed, certain that they are saying something enormously important. To me, it always sounds like this "And if I don't makethisfuckignsale I SWEAR TO GOD I will go into Danny's office and I will tell him HEISNOTGIVINGMETHESUPPORTINEED." And on, and on, and on, until finally they tell you you're an all right guy and ask if you want to share a few bumps with them. I was once at a party where two of these guys stood on either side of me, each babbling at a manic pace into my ear, unaware of each other. It's not an experience I enjoy in mono; In stereo, it's unendurable. Coco and I were friends with a French fellow in New Orleans who had a coke problem. He was the piano player for a nightclub in the French Quarter, and we were the club's day staff. Every week, he would come into the club, exhausted and frantic, desperate for his paycheck, his hair matted to his head, his skin pale and shiny. An hour later, he would come back to the club, full of energy. He often rode up on a child's bicycle. "Where did you get that," we would ask. "Oh," he'd answer noncommittally. "I just found it." "COCAINE IS THE HARDEST DRUG" LYRICS: There's a white dog walking Down the middle of the lane There's a car that is idling Beneath the weather vane There is a debt that is owed And a man's come to collect And all the money's gone And all that's left it debt Oh cocaine is the hardest drug Cocaine is the hardest drug Cocaine is the hardest drug Oh Cocaine is the hardest drug I met a girl in Denver We spent a hundred at least per day A mountain of white powder And we sniffed it all away I struck her once in anger Then I struck her again for fun I woke up the next morning With all my money gone Oh cocaine is the hardest drug Cocaine is the hardest drug Cocaine is the hardest drug Oh Cocaine is the hardest drug I dropped a dime in Reno I did five years in Vermont I learned two things in prison What you need and what you want I'm clean sometimes for weeks But then dirty again for years I'll swear off the cocaine And then the cocaine just appears Oh cocaine is the hardest drug Cocaine is the hardest drug Cocaine is the hardest drug Oh Cocaine is the hardest drug Less

Part of my Old Songs project. A cowboy song about a lawman and the murderer who plans to kill him. Another cowboy song, written in about 2003 when I was living in Omaha and performing a singing cowboy show. I remember listening to a lot of contemporary country music and finding myself quite frustrated that anything Western had been eliminated from country/western. Where there had once been a musical tradition that was parallel to -- and often intersected -- the cowboy movie genre, there were very few musical tales of rough-riding, 10-gallon-hat-wearing buckaroos and the bed men they battled. And so I went ahead and wrote one. This couldn't be much more Western, but I wanted it also to have a sort of folk song quality to it, somewhat like Dimitri Tiomkin's song "Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darling," from the film High Noon, which doesn't so much sound like a singing cowboy song, instead sounding like some ancient ballad. I never sand this during my singing cowboy show, which was intended for children. The show consisted of me yodeling, twirling a pistol (it was a non-firing reproduction, and I generally brought a child out of the audience and taught him or her to do a simple twirl), and an episode of the Gene Autry serial The Phantom Empire. I also read short poems and performed what I called "Toy Theater" productions -- these were short plays acted out entirely with store bought toys. In the first one I did, I had a plump stuffed doll of a woman that was missing a leg, and, throughout the performance, I had her scream "I have the DIABETES." I found this quite funny, but the children just seemed confused and the parents responded with embarrassed silence, so I thought it might be a good idea to take care to distinguish between "what I enjoy" and "what is appropriate for children." This song, with its melancholy theme of a lawman going to face his death at the hands of a murderer, did not seem right for children. "BACK TO THE RIO GRAND" LYRICS: There's a town I know in old Texas That is near the Rio Grand There's a pine box with my name on it And a duty I understand O will you wait for me O will you hold my hand O will you bury me When I go back to the Rio Grand There's a star I wear upon my chest And a six gun in my hand There's a killer waiting there for me Down at the Rio Grand O will you wait for me O will you hold my hand O will you bury me When I go back to the Rio Grand There's a fight that every man must face If he is to be a man And this fight I know will take my life Down at the Rio Grand O will you wait for me O will you hold my hand O will you bury me When I go back to the Rio Grand Less